Would you look at that? NVIDIA hinted it would be coming today, and it looks like the tease is living up to the hype. The company stormed into the weekend at its Shanghai Game Festival by unleashing its latest offering, the GeForce GTX 690 -- and oh yeah, it's packing two 28nm Kepler GPUs! Trumping the recently released GTX 680 as the "worlds fastest graphics card," it's loaded with a whopping 3,072 Cuda cores. The outer frame is made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, while you'll find thixomolded magnesium alloy around the fan for vibration reduction and added cooling. Aiding in cooling even further, the unit also sports a dual vapor chamber and center-mounted fan. It'll cost you a spendy $1,000 to pick up one these puppies come May 3rd, and you'll likely be tempted to double up -- two can run together in SLI as an effective quad-core card. With that said, NVIDIA claims that a single 690 runs 4dB quieter and handles about twice the framerate as a duo of GTX 680s in SLI -- impressive, but we'll reserve judgement until we see it for ourselves. check out the press release after the break if you'd like more information in the meantime (...and yes, it runs Crysis -- 2 Ultra to be exact -- at 57.8fps, according to NVIDIA).

Starting price nearly as high as 2 680 cards. This is neither attractive nor normal.

This card is cuting edge technlogy and considering a first time 2 full power GPUs (just downclock 8%) and state of the art quiet cooling, card is very attractive and not expensive.

Quote:

A heavy duty dual vapor chamber cooling system relying on heavily nickel plated finstacks will sweat what little heat these GPUs pump out. A cast aluminum frame with trivalent chromium plating gives the card a unique look and tremendous rigidity. An injection molded magnesium fan housing adds to the formidable stiffness of the card. A brand new thixomolding process was used to get the required part precision.

The fan housing is made from injection molded magnesium alloy. Magnesium alloys are used throughout the automotive and aerospace industry (including the engines of the Bugatti Veyron and F-22 Raptor) for their light weight, heat dissipation and acoustic dampening properties - which is the same reason we use it in the GTX 690.

The sound profile of the GeForce GTX 690 will be 36db at idle and a mere 46db under full gaming load.

It may very well use "airspace" technology, and I agree the cooler the better, but come on, where they say, "A cast aluminum frame with trivalent chromium plating gives the card a unique look and tremendous rigidity. An injection molded magnesium fan housing adds to the formidable stiffness of the card." They aren't designing a car chassis, it's a heatsink. Next they'll be trying to sell us carbon-fibre shrouds for "lightweight, high performance" coolers!

All said though, looks impressive, but I'll be waiting for the next best single GPU solution. On a side note, I wonder how much of that $1k price tag is attributed to that cooler?

"The outer frame is made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, while you'll find thixomolded magnesium alloy around the fan for vibration reduction and added cooling."

ill translate = WE ARE SO ****ING CHEAP WE DIDNT CARE TO PUT COPPER ON YOUR GFX (:

especialy the trivalent chromium plated part is a ****ing joke.. nobody needs to know what state the chromium is in. they arent selling this to chemists, they are selling it to gamers - the fact that most gamers dont know wtf that means is just proof of it. i feel ashamed to be a chemist and actualy understand that nvidia crap